StanfordEducatorSummer 2012

laude Steele stepped into his new role as the

I. James Quillen Dean for Stanford University School of

Education on September 1, 2011. Steele, who served

as the twenty-first provost of Columbia University, is

a preeminent social psychologist. Prior to assuming the position

of chief academic officer at Columbia, he was a member of the

Stanford psychology faculty from 1991 to 2009. On The Farm,

he held appointments as the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social

Sciences, chair of the Psychology Department, director of the

Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and director

of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His

research focuses on the psychological experience of the individual,

and particularly, on the experience of threats to the self and

the consequences of those threats. His book, Whistling Vivaldi:

How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do, examines his

theory of stereotype threat, which has been the focus of much of

his research for the past 20 years. Steele earned his doctorate in

psychology from Ohio State University, and has received honorary

degrees from the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago,

Yale University, Princeton University, and the

University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is

an elected member of the National Academy

of Sciences, National Academy of Education,

American Philosophical Society, and American

Academy of Arts and Sciences.

continued on page 14

Stanford University School of

Education Alumni

Newsletter

Inside Page

Welcoming Our New Dean 1

School of Education Launches Lemann Center 2

End of the American Dream? 3

School Reform Gets Real World 5

“Learning to Be Jewish” 8

Faculty News 11

Friends 18

Alumni News 20

Alumni Spotlight: Todd Dickson 22

Student News 26

Table of Contents

http://ed.stanford.edu

Welcoming Our New DeanAn Interview with Claude SteeleBy Amy Yuen and Mindy Hollar

CA Return to the Farm: Claude Steele at the Cubberley Library.

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n a concerted effort to significantly improve public education

in Brazil in the next decade, the School of Education has

launched a new center at Stanford aimed at developing new

approaches to improve learning in Brazilian public schools.

Named the Lemann Center for Educational Entrepreneurship and

Innovation in Brazil, the Center will create new educational oppor-

tunities inside and outside of the classroom, particularly for Brazil’s

low-income students.

The Lemann Center is a ten-year partnership between Stanford

and the Lemann Foundation, a nonprofit organization that aims to

improve the quality of public education in Brazil. Program activi-

ties are predominantly taking place on the Stanford campus, with

additional exchanges, seminars, and research taking place in Brazil.

“We want to train a new generation of educational researchers

and practitioners in Brazil, and encourage innovative policies that

will help our emerging country define our own education system,”

said Denis Mizne, executive director of the Lemann Foundation.

“We chose to partner with Stanford University because of its prox-

imity to Silicon Valley and its demonstrated ability to inspire inter-

disciplinary solutions to complex, global problems.”

In addition to training educational researchers and practitioners,

the Center is training Brazilian policymakers, technology innovators,

and entrepreneurs to improve access and quality in the educational

system in Brazil, which has become one of the fastest-growing

economies in the world. The

Center aims to attract the

best and brightest of Brazil’s

graduates and professionals

from a range of top-ranked

fields, including engineering,

economics, applied mathe-

matics, and business.

“The Stanford School

of Education is known for

producing leaders who

are shaping research and

practice around the world,

and we are thrilled to build

on our global involvement in

education,” said Co-principal

Investigator and Professor

Martin Carnoy. “We view

the Center’s three areas of focus—education policy, technological

innovation, and entrepreneurship—as crucial components to

sustaining lasting educational reform in a country as large and

diverse as Brazil.”

Major initiatives of the new Center include:

Graduate training: Fellowships will be offered annually to

students from Brazil admitted to the School of Education’s mas-

ter’s and doctoral programs and through Stanford’s joint MA/MBA

program between the Graduate School of Business and the School

of Education. Students will be trained to play key roles in Brazil in

the areas of educational policy, learning design, and educational

entrepreneurship.

Hosting visiting researchers and professionals: The Center

will invite visiting educational researchers and innovators from Brazil

to attend seminars and to work with Stanford faculty and Lemann

Fellowship students.

Researching Innovative Approaches to Educational Change:

The Center’s four lead faculty—Eric Bettinger, Paulo Blikstein,

Martin Carnoy, and David Plank—will work with Lemann Fellows,

visiting researchers and professionals, and other Stanford faculty

and students to produce and disseminate research on educational

policy, technological innovation, measurement, and entrepreneurial

projects related to improving Brazilian education.

Implementing an Educational Think Tank in Brazil: The

Center will create a counterpart policy research dissemination

organization in Brazil, with the goal of increasing the impact of

academic policy research in education policy debates in Brasilia

and/or state capitals. This Brazil-based organization will draw on the

StanfordEducatorCREDITS

Claude Steele, Dean

Rebecca Tseng Smith, Associate Dean for External Relations

Amy Yuen, Editor/Writer

Marguerite Rigoglioso, Mindy Hollar, Brianna Liang, Nancy Mancini, Katie Oey, Heather Trippel, Rebecca Tseng Smith, Contributing Writers

Elaine Kwong Design, Design

School of Education Launches Center to Improve Brazilian Education By Amy Yuen

continued on page 10

Representatives from the Lemann Foundation meet with principal faculty and student fellows of the Lemann Center for Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Brazil.

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Summer 2012 33

It’s a well-established fact that the rich are growing richer and the poor are growing poorer, and that there are fewer and fewer people in between. What’s not so well known is how that income gap may be translating into disparities in educational success— and what that might mean for the long-term future of individuals, eco-nomically challenged groups, and our entire nation.

A recently published study by Professor Sean Reardon is sounding alarm bells. Reardon has found that the gap in test scores between the highest and lowest-income students has grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s and is now nearly twice as large as the black-white achievement gap.

“That disparity is leading to a feedback cycle in which it’s becom-ing harder and harder to achieve the American dream,” says Reardon, an expert on the causes and conse-quences of social and educational inequality. As he explains it, if family income is a predictor of how well peo-ple do in school, and if school perfor-mance determines how much people earn in the market, then economic inequality is only breeding more eco-nomic inequality. Education is no lon-ger the pathway to social mobility in the United States that it once was.

Related studies have found that the college completion rate for children from high-income families has grown sharply in the last few decades, while

the completion rate for students from low-income families has barely moved. “This rising gap in academic skills and college completion has come at a time when the economy relies increas-ingly on well-educated workers,” say Reardon. “Largely gone are the manufacturing jobs that provided a middle-class wage but did not require a college degree.” In today’s economy, then, young men and women with-out college degrees are increasingly consigned to low-wage jobs with little opportunity for advancement. This is making educational achievement more and more critical.

Especially alarming, then, is Reardon’s finding that the gap in test scores means that the lowest-income children are lagging a crippling four years worth of schooling behind their more wealthy peers. Fifty years ago, they were lacking only about two and a half years behind.

Roots of the Growing Divide“Schools are not the primary cause of the problem,” asserts Reardon. “If they were, the test-score gap would widen as students progress through school, but this does not happen. The test-score gap between eighth-grade students from high-and low-income families is no larger than the school-readiness gap among kinder-gartners. The roots of widening educa-tional inequality appear to lie in early childhood, not in schools.”

Why? Parents who are struggling to make ends meet have little time to worry about their children’s cogni-tive development, and they don’t have the funds to pay for their enrichment, explains Reardon, whose research

continued on page 4

End of the American Dream?Income Disparities are Widening the Achievement GapBy Marguerite Rigoglioso

“The roots of widening educational inequality appears to lie in early childhood, not in schools,” says Sean Reardon.

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attracted national attention after being published as a chapter in Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances (Russell Sage Foundation, 2011). In contrast, parents who are economically com-fortable are able to spend more time reading with their children and have more money to buy stimulating games and pay for enriching activities. “It’s not about a lack of parental skills. The problem is structural,” he says.

The good news is that, in terms of test scores, African American stu-dents are now closer to white students than low-income children are to high-income children. But the knowledge that the racial achievement gap has narrowed over the past few decades is cold comfort in the face of this new finding, which spans all races and ethnicities and speaks to a growing tear in the fabric of American society.

The solutions, then, Reardon posits, are economic and social. “The best way to reduce inequality and educational outcomes is to ensure that all students start on a more even footing. This would take a number of levers,” he says. “We need to make sure people have access to stable jobs that pay a living wage. We need affordable health care, and we need a social safety net to support families through the hard times between jobs. We also need high-quality child-care and preschool programs for low-and middle-income children. This would

relieve their stress and allow them to help develop their children’s potential.”

Striking a NerveReardon took his case to Capitol Hill on April 19, where he spoke at a briefing sponsored by the Stanford Center on Opportunity Policy in Education and the Economic Policy Institute. The New York Times, The Boston Review, blogs, and other media have also picked up on the story, which, Reardon says, “has struck a nerve.”

“In preliminary meetings for our book, we thought that

Sean’s plan to look at 17 data sets on test scores spanning 40 years was incredibly ambitious, but remarkably, with the help of some very good grad-uate students, he did it,” says Greg Duncan, a professor of education at the University of California, Irvine and one of the editors of Whither Opportunity. “The results are dramatic. The extent to which educational opportunities and future labor market

prospects of rich and poor children have diverged over the last 40 years is not something our country wants to believe about itself, but it’s an unde-niable fact that we have to come to terms with.”

Linda Darling-Hammond, the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford, observes, “Because the broader social safety net is now more tattered for children, the

effects of coming from a low-income background are now worse for kids than when we were more socially sta-ble. Sean’s results show us that it’s not simply a question of ‘getting schools to do better.’ Poverty does matter. This points to the need for wrap-around services for children before they even get to kindergarten, as well as while they are in school.”

“We can—and must—do more to improve our schools, of course, particularly those schools that enroll low-income students,” says Reardon. “But schools alone cannot save the American dream.”

Read Reardon’s study on the CEPA website at http://bit.ly/NmwxrK. SE

American Dream continued from page 3

“Because the broader social safety net is now more tattered for children, the effects of coming from a low-income background are now worse for kids than when we were more socially stable.”

– Linda Darling-Hammond

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Reardon presents new research at a recent Stanford conference on income, inequality, and educational success.

Summer 2012 55

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ason” was the kind of ninth grader

his teachers reluctantly identified

as someone on the “prison track.”

A boy with a troubled past, he

was constantly putting himself in danger of

arrest through his frequent acts of graffiti.

But when John Muir High School in

Pasadena, CA, adopted a new approach

to delivering pedagogy called “Linked

Learning,” all that changed. Through the

coordinated courses he started taking in

the school’s Arts, Entertainment, and Media

Academy, Jason realized he had a valuable

talent that could be channeled to more pro-

ductive purposes. Now a senior, the teen

is earning awards and even making money

with his art—which is no longer defacing

public property. What’s more, through a

field-based internship and other learning

experiences in his pathway, he’s learning a range of practical and

creative skills that can help him prepare both for college and a

career success.

Jason’s experience is just one of the many successes found

among the nine school districts participating in the California Linked

Learning District Initiative, a statewide effort launched by the James

Irvine Foundation in 2008. Under this initiative, leaders from school

districts, schools, civic organizations, various industries, non-profits,

and higher educational institutions have been collaborating to build

high-quality academic “pathways” among disciplines—making

education relevant to the real-world needs of any students in the

district, especially those traditionally underserved.

“Linked Learning is about preparing students for both college

and career, not college or career,” says Erik Rice, senior associ-

ate with the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education

(SCOPE), which is providing professional development for district

and pathway leaders.

Connecting the DotsLinked Learning stresses continuous integration of academic instruc-

tion with demanding technical curriculum, field-based learning, and

student supports, embedded into career-themed schools or smaller

learning communities known as “pathways.” With Linked Learning,

teachers in subjects traditionally siloed, like history, English, art, sci-

ence, and career technology, are now working with each other to

create coordinated curricula that focus on a career theme. In addi-

tion to its arts academy, for example, John Muir in Pasadena boasts

the Business and Entrepreneurship Academy and Engineering and

Environmental Sciences Academy for ninth through twelfth graders.

“The classes create tangible links between school subjects and

the themes of the academies so that kids know why they should

care about what they’re learning,” says Ed Honowitz, school board

member in Pasadena. Working in small cohorts with the same peers

and teachers over time, students also receive greater attention and

mentoring. They are supported in tracking their graduation require-

ments and learning how to apply for college, as well.

Equally important, through community collaborations, students

are given opportunities in the workaday world like internships and

job shadowing to find out what exactly happens behind the intimi-

dating doors of business buildings, hospitals, and a host of other

organizations. “Students gain access to experiences, equipment,

tools, and people, which is super important in our world,” says

Cynthia Lake, an art educator at John Muir High School, where her

own students now take classes and have the ear of professionals

at the prestigious Art Center College of Design. Farther afield, in

School Reform Gets Real WorldLinked Learning in California Serves the Whole StudentBy Marguerite Rigoglioso

J”

Students from John Muir High School meet with a scientist at the Avery Research Center in Pasadena, looking at samples of products developed at the lab.

continued on page 5

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Antioch, CA, Dozier-Libbey Medical High School, has established

field experiences through its network with healthcare professionals

at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, which is located a mere few

hundred yards away from the school.

Learning to Teach in New WaysRetooling for pathway teaching can be a formidable task for profes-

sionals used to traditional educational models. At SCOPE, senior

associates Rice and Elle Rustique are leading the charge with a

leadership development series for district and pathway leaders. For

the past three years, district leadership teams have attended sum-

mer institutes at Stanford to immerse themselves in cutting-edge

workshops with experts from the university’s schools of education,

business, and design. SCOPE has also supported these teams

through residencies hosted by network districts.

In addition, SCOPE has helped coordinate and lead an aligned

professional development series, supporting pathway leadership

teams from the nine participating districts. This has focused largely

on building technical and leadership capacity for Linked Learning

with emphasis on curriculum and instruction, assessment, and adult

communities of practice.

SCOPE also provides knowledge briefs and case studies

detailing specific districts’ successes and challenges. “Learning

about what others in the Linked Learning Initiative are doing and

having access to cutting-edge research on these practices gives

us valuable knowledge to apply to our own reform efforts,” says

Donald Gill, superintendent of Antioch Unified School District.

ConnectEd: The California Center for College and Career—an

organization founded in 2006 to support the Linked Learning

Initiative—has been a central partner in the leadership develop-

ment series and has provided further technical assistance and

coaching to the nine districts. This includes Antioch, Los Angeles

District 4, Long Beach, Montebello, Oakland, Pasadena, Porterville,

Sacramento, and West Contra Costa. As of March 2010, with Irvine

Foundation support, ConnectEd has awarded almost $12 million in

grants for the enterprise.

Encouraging ResultsEach district that has rolled out a Linked Learning initiative over

the past four years has seen marked results. “Students in pathways

curricula outperform their peers who are not in such programs,”

says Rice. Early data reveals that test scores, drop-out rates, and

college attendance numbers have improved significantly across the

network. (To see data and read the SCOPE case studies, please visit

http://edpolicy.stanford.edu.)

“Kids are also much more engaged in doing exciting things,”

reports Honowitz in Pasadena. Students in the Engineering and

Environmental Sciences Academy at Muir, for example, collabo-

rated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Cal Tech to create a

solar-powered boat that they entered into a design race—winning

first prize for the fastest craft. “These are incredible experiences

with life-changing consequences that students wouldn’t have had

otherwise,” says Honowitz.

“My own children, who don’t go to Muir, are actually envious

of what they call the ‘real’ education that students at Muir are get-

ting,” notes Cynthia Lake. “This kind of learning can be costly in

terms of time, effort, and money, but it will be more costly to our

society if we don’t provide this kind of relevant pedagogy across

the board in the U.S. educational system.” Clearly, Linked Learning

is an approach whose time has come.

“In the coming years, we expect to see all nine districts continue

to develop the systems, structures, and culture to support a system

of high quality pathways,” says Rice. “As districts and pathways

work with their civic, business, and other community partners to

implement Linked Learning, there will be increased evidence of

positive impact on student outcomes. SCOPE intends to continue

to be a central partner to ensure that all students in these districts

have access to Linked Learning pathways and the rich learning

experiences that are required to be college and career ready.” SE

School Reform continued from page 5

Peter Lambert, principal of C.K. McClatchy High School in Sacramento, CA, shows an illustration describing the cycle of school reform as part of a workshop on design thinking. The session, held at Stanford’s d.school, was part of last June’s Linked Learning Summer Institute for California district leaders.

Summer 2012 77

Darling-Hammond Wins 2012 Grawemeyer Award

Valdés Receives AERA’s Highest Honor

Linda Darling-Hammond received the coveted 2012 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Education for her book, The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equality Will Determine Our Future (Teachers College Press, 2010). The United States, her book found, no longer leads the world in education because it spends far less on low-income and minority students than it does on affluent students. Her book demonstrates that while nations in Europe and Asia fund schools centrally and equally, the wealthiest U.S. school districts spend nearly 10 times more than the poorest. In particular, black and Hispanic children in America consistently fall behind global academic norms because they have less access to well-prepared teachers and engaging classes than white and Asian students, she found. Previous winners of the Grawemeyer Award include Lee

Shulman, Elliot Eisner, and Milbrey McLaughlin. SE

Guadalupe Valdés, the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum

Professor of Education, received the Distinguished

Contributions to Research in Education Award by the

American Educational Research Association for her outstand-

ing achievement and success in education research. The award

seeks to publicize, motivate, encourage, and suggest models

for educational research at its best.

Award committee members wrote, “(Valdés’) scholarly

journey as an English learner, language teacher, and educational

researcher has helped several generations of teachers and

scholars develop, refine, and test the validity of educational

tools that help the millions of American language learners

develop bilingual competence and bicultural identities, so that

they can be treated, in the ennobling words from the title of

one of Professor Valdes’ most influential books, Con Respeto.”

Valdés joins several School of Education faculty who have

won the award in the past, including Lee Cronbach, Linda

Darling-Hammond, Nathaniel Gage, Milbrey McLaughlin,

Lee Shulman, and David Tyack. SE

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Linda Darling-Hammond, pictured here with Allan Dittmer and Diane Kyle of the Grawemeyer Awards, delivers her acceptance speech at the 2012 Grawemeyer Awards banquet.

Guadalupe Valdés with UC Berkeley’s P. David Pearson, who received the award in 2010.

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StanfordEducator8

efore joining the School

of Education as the inau-

gural Jim Joseph Chair

in Education and Jewish

Studies, Ari Y. Kelman was an

associate professor of American

Studies at the University of

California, Davis. He is interested

in research at the intersection of

education and Jewish Studies, with

an emphasis on the myriad ways in

which people cultivate ethnic and

religious identities and practices.

His research focuses on questions

of culture in all of its manifestations,

including the material, aural, visual,

and ideological. He is the author

of Station Identification: A Cultural

History of Yiddish Radio (University

of California Press, 2009), editor

of Is Diss a System? A Milt Gross

Comic Reader (NYU Press, 2010),

and co-author of Sacred Strategies:

Transforming Synagogues from

Functional to Visionary (The Alban

Institute, 2011). Kelman directs the new doctoral concentration in

Education and Jewish Studies.

The subjects of your books and scholarship have varied in

quite interesting ways. Is there a common thread that you’re

following?

The question that interests me the most is how people learn by

engaging with two phenomena: popular culture and religion.

I’m especially interested in how that happens outside of schools.

For example, in the book about Yiddish radio, I tried to under-

stand how Jewish immigrants tried to figure out what it meant

to be a minority community and how they used the most cutting-

edge mass medium, at that time, to interact with mainstream

popular culture. Mass media shaped both how they learned to be

Americans, and how they learned to be Jewish in America.

My next book presented the flip side of that conversation. I was

looking at Milt Gross, whose cartoons were in English but in a

highly stylized Yiddish dialect. Again, popular culture provided a

space in which Gross, himself an immigrant, could affectionately

caricature Jewish culture by using Yiddish accents, but by render-

ing it in English. Working in a medium that nobody seemed to

take seriously allowed Gross to speak across the immigrant-native

divide and parody otherwise complex issues that immigrants faced.

In my other book, my co-authors and I looked at synagogues as

educational venues. We not only focused on synagogue schools,

but also on worship, community building, and social justice work.

We looked at what makes synagogues places where people go to

engage in conversations around religion and community. Again,

for the majority of people we interviewed, synagogues were places

of learning, even when that happened through volunteer work

or worship.

SchoolNews

“Learning to be Jewish”An Interview with Ari Y. KelmanBy Rebecca Tseng Smith

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Ari Y. Kelman speaks at a spring reception honoring the Jim Joseph Foundation and celebrating his new appointment.

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Summer 2012 99

Your new book is titled Learning to be Jewish.

What will it be about?

I don’t know if that will be the title anymore.

Originally, I thought of it as a collection of essays

that would look at different cultural texts that

“taught” people to be Jewish—“Fiddler on the

Roof” or The Jewish Catalog, for example. I

am interested in how people learn to navigate

Judaism in all of its complexities. People learn

to be Jewish in a variety of places and practices:

film festivals, casual conversations, family dinners,

and tourism, to name a few. Becoming religious

is one dimension of the larger phenomenon I’m

interested in, but that is certainly not my central

focus. I am using the phrase, “learning to be

Jewish” to frame my own research, focusing on

the very informal and often uncoordinated ways

that people learn to engage with Jewish knowl-

edge, ideas, people, and institutions.

I notice that you tweet and blog fairly often. How does that all

fit into your job as a faculty member in our School?

I’m a very bad blogger, and a worse tweeter. I don’t do either very

much these days. For me, tweeting is more like a conversation, but

blogging is different. I think blogging is a useful vehicle for hash-

ing out even partially formed ideas. For my students, blogging will

be a chance to share what they are learning in their classes, and

voice their views of current events and new ideas in a public forum.

It’s critical that my students know how to talk to other academics

on a scholarly level, but they also need to be able to talk to people

beyond the academy. I hope that blogging, among other things,

will help them do that. If we can extend the research and learning

that we do in the Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies

to the outside world and engage people who are interested in

questions about religion and ethnicity, community and religion,

that’s a good thing.

What does it mean to be the Jim Joseph Chair?

It’s a combination of opportunity and responsibility. First and

foremost, it’s the opportunity to contribute to the understanding

of the relationship between religion and education. Second, it is

about training students to advance that field of research, too. I’m

excited about helping build a creative community in which stu-

dents can develop their own research interests and projects that

will benefit the world they live in. For me, I want to push the field of

education to think more critically about religion and push the field

of religious studies to think more critically about education, both

inside and outside of formal learning environments. In terms of

responsibility, I think this field of study is important for understand-

ing contemporary life, politics and culture—for Jews specifically,

but for religious and ethnic communities more generally, as well.

What should we know about this new concentration in educa-

tion and Jewish studies?

I want the concentration to be known as a place for critical scholar-

ship that will inform practice, theory, and policy. It’s really impor-

tant to me that we do some comparative work across religious

and ethnic lines and engage in conversations about that work. If

we’re just talking about Jews for Jews, then we’re not taking full

advantage of the opportunity to work in this rich field.

Similarly, if we approach education narrowly and only examine

schools, we are missing the complex sites and circumstances in

which people engage with religious ideas, information, texts, com-

munities, and traditions. Developing a rigorous research program

to examine the intersection of these fields will help people and

institutions better understand the work they do, and encourage

deeper understandings of these complex phenomena.

For more information about the new Concentration in Education

and Jewish Studies, visit http://edjs.stanford.edu SE

Ari Y. Kelman with his parents, Stuart and Vickie Kelman.

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Education leaders across the country are confounded by a growing phe-nomenon: too many students are not college-ready when they leave high school. Although indicators exist to identify students at risk of dropping out of high school, few indicators of

students’ college readiness are cur-rently in place, and few districts have linked indicators to action-oriented practices and policies.

The John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities (JGC) at Stanford and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform (AISR) at Brown University are partnering on a three-year initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop and study the implementation of a sys-tem of signals and supports designed to increase the readiness of students to enter and succeed in college.

The College Readiness Indicator

Systems (CRIS) initiative includes a menu of indicators within three dimensions related to college readiness and success: academic

preparedness, academic tenacity, and college knowledge. The initiative’s tri-level approach situates indicators at the individual (student), setting (classroom or school), and system (district) levels with the ultimate goal of informing action to improve college readiness.

JGC is studying the implementa-tion of CRIS in collaboration with five school district partners across the country and developing a set of tools for districts to adapt to their needs. AISR is focusing on cross-site learn-ing; understanding issues related to district, municipal, state, and federal contexts; and process documentation. The groundbreaking initiative has also brought together other organizations, including the Consortium on Chicago School Research, to present field-informing college readiness research. For more information on the CRIS initiative, please visit http://jgc.stanford.edu/our_work/cris.html SE

John W. Gardner Center Initiative Targets College ReadinessBy Nancy Mancini

Ed Haertel, Milbrey McLaughlin, and Kara Dukakis (L to R) are leading the team of Stanford researchers involved in the initiative.

expertise of Brazilian and other education policy scholars.

Supporting Teacher Education in Brazil: The Center will

work with the Stanford Teacher Education Program to train teams

of teacher educators in highly effective, innovative methods for

preparing high quality teachers in the context of the Brazilian

university system.

“Creating this center has been my dream and a goal for

years,” said Co-PI and Assistant Professor Paulo Blikstein,

director of the Transformative Learning Technologies Lab. “As a

Brazilian-born scholar, I am excited about our partnership with the

Lemann Foundation to improve education, especially among the

disadvantaged. We need the best minds in the country thinking

about how to improve learning in Brazilian public schools. Through

this center, we are putting together technological innovation and

large-scale policy change in a way that has never been done before,

and we are scaling up cutting-edge educational innovation. Every

country should be doing this in today’s knowledge economy. We

cannot settle for the ‘basics’ anymore.”

“We hope to make a real and positive impact on education

in Brazil through this exciting new partnership with the Lemann

Foundation,” said Dean Claude Steele. “I know we will have a

lively exchange with Brazilian colleagues and practitioners, and I

am equally hopeful that this new work will enrich our research and

teaching. The Lemann Center will sharpen our ability to prepare our

graduates to live and work in an increasingly international context.”

Established in 2002, the Lemann Foundation is a nonprofit

organization working to improve the quality of public education

in Brazil. The foundation provides outstanding opportunities

to talented youth to build a more productive and equitable

country. The Lemann Center for Educational Entrepreneurship and

Innovation in Brazil is another initiative of the Lemann Foundation to

help develop qualified human capital in the country and accelerate

social change in Brazil.

For more information about the Lemann Center for

Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Brazil, visit http://

lemanncenter.stanford.edu SE

New Center continued from page 2

Summer 2012 1111

FacultyNews

H. Samy Alim is the recipient of this year’s Early Career

Award from Division G (Social Context of Education)

of the American Education Research Association. The

award recognizes outstanding scholars with an exemplary

early career record of research on the social contexts of

education. In presenting the honor, the award commit-

tee cited “the breadth and depth of Dr. Alim’s work, as

evidenced in his record of publication (from top sociolin-

guistics journals to The New York Times), its creativity,

importance, and international impact.” As faculty direc-

tor of Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts, Alim

organized the April 2011 conference, “Hip Hop, Race

and Citizenship in France, Japan, and the United States,”

featuring Chuck D of the acclaimed hip hop group Public

Enemy, and scholars from universities across the country.

Alim presented the keynote address at the “Translating

Hip Hop” conference in Berlin last November, co-hosted

by the House of World Culture and the Goethe Institute.

Nicole Ardoin is the principal investigator of a four-year

study titled, “Environmental Learning in the San Francisco

Bay Area: Networks, Place Connections, Stewardship, and

Educational Outcomes.” The project, which seeks to

advance the field of environmental education by strength-

ening its theoretical basis and providing findings that can

improve practice, was awarded a $1.4 million grant from

the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation last December. The study

examines how, when, where, and why people learn about

the environment and become motivated to act sustainably

within a community and regional context. Additionally, the

project investigates the role that a person’s sense of place

plays in their learning and stewardship actions, and how

environmental education contributes to academic, learn-

ing, sustainability, and conservation outcomes.

Eric Bettinger received a five-year, $4.9 million grant from

the Institute of Education Sciences to expand outreach of

his “Simplifying the FAFSA” project. With prior funding

from the National Science Foundation and Department

of Education, Bettinger and colleagues from Harvard and

the University of Toronto conducted a randomized exper-

iment in 2008 to determine whether streamlining the

application process for the Free Application for Federal

Student Aid (FAFSA) and providing information increased

college enrollment. The intervention, which took place

at select H&R Block offices in Ohio and North Carolina,

resulted in a 20% increase in college attendance in those

target areas. With the new grant, Bettinger will expand

the project on a national scale, potentially reaching 3.5

million people who use free tax-filing services. He and his

colleagues will measure the effects of these simplification

and assistance efforts on college outcomes.

Paulo Blikstein received the Faculty Early Career

Development (CAREER) Award by the National Science

Foundation in January. The award supports junior fac-

ulty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through

outstanding research, excellent education, and the inte-

gration of education and research within the context of

the mission of their organizations. Blikstein was awarded

five years of funding for “Bifocal Modeling: A New

Framework for the Learning of Advanced Science and

Engineering Content in High School,” a project aimed at

bringing cutting-edge content and inquiry methods from

scientific research labs into high schools. In March, he

opened the Bourn Lab at Castilleja School in Palo Alto,

CA. The Bourn lab—part of Blikstein’s growing FabLab@

School network aimed at boosting interest in STEM fields

among K-12 students and undergraduates—is the first

design and digital fabrication lab in the country built at a

U.S. secondary school. Last October, he spoke at TEDx

Manhattan Beach last October about FabLab@School.

Watch the full talk online at http://bit.ly/vBEdlK.

Prudence Carter has published the book, Stubborn

Roots: Race, Culture, and Inequality in U.S. and South

African Schools (Oxford University Press, 2012). Stubborn

Roots seeks to understand what features of the school

environment most effectively facilitate the incorpora-

tion of students of color. Carter examines this question

through a comparative analysis of organizational and

group dynamics in eight schools within the United States

and South Africa, nations rebounding from centuries

of institutionalized racial and social inequality. Carter’s

book provides insight into how school communities can

better incorporate previously disadvantaged groups and

promote equity by addressing socio-cultural contexts

and promoting “cultural flexibility.”

Linda Darling-Hammond received the Research-to-

Policy Award at the National Conference on Research

in Language and Literacy last November. In December,

she was honored by the California Educational Research

continued on page 12

H. Samy Alim

Eric Bettinger

Prudence Carter

Nicole Ardoin

Paulo Blikstein

StanfordEducator12

FacultyNews

Linda Darling-Hammond

Edward Haertel

Susan O’Hara

Susanna Loeb

Association with the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award

for her genuine contributions to educational research,

assessment, practice, and policy. Previous awardees

include Edward Haertel (2007) and Richard Shavelson

(2004). She also received an honorary doctorate from the

University of Alicante in Spain in January. This September,

the Academy of Education Arts and Sciences will honor

her for her distinguished lifelong commitment and accom-

plishments in the field of education. With SCOPE Senior

Scholar Ann Lieberman, Darling-Hammond co-edited

Teacher Education Around the World: Changing Policies

and Practices (Routledge, 2012), and co-wrote the book’s

final chapter, “Teacher Education Around the World: What

Can We Learn from International Practice?”

Edward Haertel received the 2012 E.F. Lindquist Award,

which is co-sponsored by the American Educational

Research Association (AERA) and The American College

Testing Program, for his significant contributions to

the field of testing and measurement in April. Previous

awardees include last year’s recipient, Richard

Shavelson. Haertel also received the Robert L. Linn

Distinguished Address Award from AERA Division D

(Measurement and Research Methodology). Award

presenters cited his “distinguished contributions bridging

educational measurement and assessment policy,

especially those addressing the limitations of tests and

the need for valid and equitable uses of test results.”

Susanna Loeb was nominated in March to the National

Board for Education Sciences by President Barack Obama.

As the Barnett Family Professor of Education, she directs

the Center for Education Policy Analysis, co-directs Policy

Analysis for California Education, and serves as a senior fel-

low at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Susan O’Hara and the Academic Language and Literacy

in Every Subject (ALLIES) project have been awarded a

five-year, $1.9 million National Professional Development

Grant from the Office of English Language Acquisition.

ALLIES, which is part of the Center to Support Excellence

in Teaching, received funding for “Academic Literacy

Support for Novice Teachers: A Capacity Building

Approach.” During the first phase of the project, the

team will develop, implement, test and refine a capacity-

building professional development model that provides

support to novice teachers in teaching academic lan-

guage to English learners. They will pilot the model in

the Partner School Induction Program, which includes

a network of charter schools serving a diverse student

population. The team will then work with the Northern

California Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment

consortium to bring the model to more novice teachers

in a range of public high school contexts.

Jelena Obradovic was named a William T. Grant Scholar

by the William T. Grant Foundation. The Scholars Program

supports the professional development of highly prom-

ising early-career researchers in the social, behavioral,

and health sciences. Her project, “Executive Functions

and Biological Sensitivity in Classroom Settings,” will

explore how teachers can promote students’ abilities to

regulate their own attention and behavior—skills linked

to academic and social competence. She will investigate

what features of classrooms relate to children’s executive

functions (EFs), whether children’s physiological reactiv-

ity moderates the effects of classrooms on EFs, and

whether EF’s mediate or moderate classroom effects on

academic achievement. Obradovic will work closely with

her mentors, Professor Deborah Stipek and University

of Virginia Education Professor Robert Pianta.

Jonathan Osborne was appointed to chair the Science

Expert Group responsible for writing the framework

for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and

Development’s Program for International Student

Achievement (PISA) assessment in 2015. PISA, which

tests a random sample of students in more than 60

countries on math, reading, and science every three

years, changes the focus of the assessment each three-

year cycle, and science was last selected as the major

focus in 2006. Results from the assessment are used as

a measure of the relative strength of the countries’ edu-

cational systems, and are gaining increasing attention

from policy makers and economists. The PISA science

assessment focuses on the ability to explain phenomena

scientifically, understand the nature of scientific inquiry,

and interpret scientific evidence. This is somewhat differ-

ent from the emphasis of the US National Assessment of

Educational Progress. By writing the PISA science frame-

work, Osborne and his colleagues in the Science Expert

Group will have the opportunity to help frame the kind

of science education that will be valued internationally.

´

´

Jelena Obradovic

continued from page 11

Summer 2012 1313

Amado Padilla was awarded a Presidential Citation at

the American Psychological Association meeting last

August for his lifetime commitment to research on Latino

mental health, particularly the roles of language and

ethnic identity. His research is dedicated to understand-

ing how language is symbolic of a group’s vitality and

place in the world, and he has written on a variety of

topics related to bilingual education and Latino behav-

ioral health. This summer marks the fifth year that the

California World Language Project—led by Padilla as

its principal investigator—will partner with the Palo Alto

Unified School District to offer high school students the

opportunity to immerse themselves for four weeks in

learning Mandarin.

Roy Pea was granted his fourth patent—this time, with

colleagues from SRI International—as a fundamental

contribution in the area of technology-mediated mobile

communication. The citation for the patent is as follows:

Patton, C., Roschelle, J., Pea, R.D., & Vahey, P.

“Method and system for enabling and controlling

communication typology, access to resources, and

document flow in a distributed networking environ-

ment” (Originally filed as U.S. Serial #10/012/708

on Nov. 16, 2001; Revised Appl. No. 12/249/729,

filed Oct. 10, 2008). Awarded February 28, 2012 as

U.S. Patent #8,127,039 B2.

Pea’s article in Developmental Psychology, “Media

Use, Face-to-Face Communication, Media Multitasking,

and Social Well-Being Among 8- to 12-Year-Old Girls,”

co-authored with colleagues in the Department of

Communication, was showcased by invitation from the

Science Government Office of the American Psychological

Association in May at a Capitol Hill science exhibit and

reception for Members of Congress and their staffers.

Funded by the National Science Foundation as part of

the LIFE Center, the study was featured in The New York

Times, The Wall Street Journal, San Jose Mercury News,

CNN, and CBS News.

Ray Pecheone was appointed as professor of practice.

Sean Reardon was promoted to full professor of

education.

Lee Shulman received an honorary doctorate from Freie

Universität Berlin in May for his life’s work in education

research. In presenting the award, representatives from

the university’s Department of Education and Psychology

cited Shulman’s academic brilliance, which “provided an

important impetus for the development of teacher edu-

cation in Germany.” The ceremony featured a tributary

speech by Professor Jürgen Baumert of the Max Planck

Institute for Human Development, and a panel discussion

with Shulman, Baumert, Richard Shavelson, Arizona State

University Regents Professor David Berliner (PhD ’68),

and University of Freiburg Professor Fritz Oser.

Guadalupe Valdés received the Henry T. Trueba Award

for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social

Contexts of Education from Division G (Social Context

of Education) of the American Education Research

Association. Christian Faltis (MA ’81, PhD ’83) of the

University of California, Davis nominated Valdes for

her work on bilingualism and teacher training. The Henry

T. Trueba Award recognizes scholars who have made

distinguished contributions toward changing the contexts

in which children, youth, or adults learn or teach.

John Willinsky was appointed Distinguished Scholar in

Residence at Simon Fraser University’s Library. He founded

and continues to direct the Public Knowledge Project

(PKP), an open source software suite of free e-publishing

tools. PKP has been based at Simon Fraser University

since 2005, and the university now hosts more than 350

international academic journals on its servers. Willinsky will

serve as distinguished scholar and limited term professor

through 2014.

Sam Wineburg and the efforts of the Stanford History

Education Group (SHEG) were featured by Stanford News

Service in March for SHEG’s “Reading Like a Historian”

project. “Reading Like a Historian” is a nontraditional high

school history curriculum that utilizes primary source docu-

ments to promote literacy and critical thinking skills. It was

designed by Avishag Reisman (PhD ’11) and developed

with the San Francisco Unified School District. The curricu-

lum, which draws on over 20 years of research on historical

thinking and educational practice, has been downloaded

by teachers more than a quarter of a million times. To learn

more about the Reading Like a Historian curriculum and to

watch a video about the project, visit http://bit.ly/zZcerj. SE

Jonathan Osborne

Roy Pea

Sam Wineburg

Amado Padilla

John Willinsky

StanfordEducator14

Recently, The Stanford Educator sat down

with Dean Steele to talk about his interests

and goals as the School’s new dean:

What was your first reaction when you

were offered the position of dean?

Claude: It took a little a while for it to seep

in, to see how it would align with my inter-

ests, commitments, family. The first reac-

tion was “I’m flattered to be thought of.”

I loved Stanford even when I was provost

of Columbia. I was here for 18 years before

Columbia, so I have an identification with

the institution. As time went on, the idea

gained momentum. Our nation’s challenges

in education have long been a central inter-

est and concern of mine. So it’s a thrill for

me to return in this capacity. At this point,

this job is exactly what I want to do.

The School of Education is a tremendous

school. The opportunity to lead it and to

contribute to it is exciting. It’s been well-

run, well-led, and well-resourced, relatively

speaking. We are seen as a leader in the

world, so what we do here can have a broad

impact in the world. Few other schools

enjoy that position. In education, Stanford

is one of them.

That leads to the follow up question:

What makes this the right time for a

social psychologist to take the reins at a

school of education?

C: I’ll confess a bias in answering that.

The importance of the social psychological

aspects of our experience in learning and

schooling, I believe, is underappreciated.

I think it’s often as important, sometimes

more important, to learning than strictly

cognitive processes. Identity and the effects

of social norms shape what kids become

interested in learning, and how much they

internalize the value of education. A funda-

mental goal of schooling is to help people

understand the personal importance of

learning, to become identified with educa-

tion—in one or another of its forms.

As a social psychologist, I’ve spent a lot

of time trying to unravel those processes.

Now, I’m excited about the opportunity to

see how well they apply to schooling and be

part of an effort to get those things better

understood by educators. I believe there is

untapped potential here. A lot of people

think that the frontier in schooling is edu-

cational technology, and I agree that great

possibilities lie there. But we’re not just

hard-drives on sticks. The slightest reflection

on one’s own school experience tells you

that we are full, social beings, and that learn-

ing and commitment to learning often grow

out of our experiences with other people,

in important personal and social situations.

New Deancontinued from page 1

Stev

e C

asti

llo

Feature

Understanding Stereotype Threat: Claude Steele discusses strategies to reduce stereotype threat with fellow panelists Geoff Cohen (C) and Greg Walton (R) at the Spring 2012 Cubberley Lecture.

Summer 2012 1515

What makes this a great time to explore

new areas in education like this one?

As a society we’ve become frustrated and

anxious about education. In answering the

question of whether we’re doing a good

enough job with it—that is, good enough to

sustain our economic competitiveness and

the kind of society we aspire to—the media

gives us reasons for concern on a daily basis.

But on the heels of this anxiety is a greater

openness to new ideas in education. It’s an

era of anxiety, but it’s also an era of explora-

tion, experimentation, and innovation. All of

the critical stakeholders in this era have had

to become a degree or two more flexible.

Nearly every dimension of schooling is up

for reconsideration: pedagogies, models

of school governance and financing, use of

technology, and so on. The great schools

of education, like ours, have the scientific,

scholarly, and professional expertise to help

lead education forward in this era.

This is why, I believe, it’s a great time to

explore new approaches in education—like

the one I just mentioned—and why an

education school like ours is a great place

to do it.

Can you talk about your priorities as dean?

C: My first task is to get to know the

School and understand how I can contrib-

ute. To that end, I’ve talked to every faculty

member and lots of students and staff

to understand the community--their feel-

ings, ambitions, needs, and challenges. It’s

unquestionably a team with great players

on it, so we don’t have a problem of having

to build a strong faculty and student body.

No education school in the world has a

stronger faculty or student body.

By the end of the year, I’d like to take the

school through a process of developing a mis-

sion and vision statement, strategies of im-

plementation, and some timelines and met-

rics to help us evaluate how well we’re doing.

Our mission will likely focus on four things.

First is maintaining and expanding the aca-

demic excellence of the School. We are

among the best education schools already,

with excellence in scholarship and research,

and in preparation of scholars, researchers,

and innovators. But it’s always important

to continue building “steeples of excel-

lence”—an old Stanford term—around

strong programs so that we have maxi-

mum impact and remain leaders in the

field. When I say “excellence,” I don’t

mean excellence among education schools.

I mean excellence in an absolute sense. We

should aspire, as we always have, to hire

real leaders in their area of work.

Second, I think the nation wants and deserves

schools of education to contribute solutions

to our nation’s major educational challenges.

These challenges have become more on our

minds as Americans than in decades past.

They want us to not just storehouse knowl-

edge, but to find ways that our knowledge

can help improve education in general, to

help build a school system that delivers

quality education to all sectors of society.

I would like our education school to play a

leadership role in producing knowledge and

research that influences school policies and

practices. Many of our faculty and students

are involved in doing just this; they consult

everywhere, from Singapore to Finland to

Washington, D.C. I would like to see a more

programmatic focus on this kind of activity

in the education school as a whole. Maybe

even develop training programs, clinics, or

incubators that are specifically focused on

applying knowledge to schooling problems.

Our partnerships with urban school districts,

including San Francisco Unified School District,

are very exciting to me. With S.F. Unified,

we have a director, Laura Wentworth

(PhD ’10), who coordinates between the

district and our graduate school. The dis-

trict gets research focused on the problems

that it cares about, and we’re entrained

to focus on the most pressing issues that

a real urban school district faces. It’s not

just research for research sake. Research

developed in this way—that is, bringing our

research strength to bear on a school dis-

trict’s major problems—may well improve

the performance of an entire school district.

We’d like to have that ambition, at any rate.

Third is maintaining and expanding our

high-quality programs for preparing teach-

ers and possibly extending that commit-

ment to preparing school leaders. Our

impact here won’t be in terms of training

large numbers of teachers and leaders, but

in doing it well enough to create national

models for teacher and leadership prepara-

tion. STEP is a leading teacher preparation

program that benefits from being part of

this rich, academic, intellectual environ-

ment. I think we can do the same with

school leaders. That would be a wonderful

extension of our mission.

The fourth addresses different dimensions

of our community. One is building com-

munity within the school. One of the things

I heard about in the search process was that

continued on page 16

“The great schools of education, like ours, have the scientific, scholarly, and professional expertise to help lead education forward in this era.” – Dean Claude Steele

StanfordEducator16

Feature

our larger school community is less than the

sum of its parts. We are a school with great

programs, great faculty and students, great

centers, but we could have a more cohesive

community. This is immensely important to

me. A strong community can amplify the

impact that a school can have, both on the

faculty and student members of the school

and on the people whose work is affected

by it. When you pull together and form an

intellectually stimulating environment, the

work gets richer, and the impact increases.

I’d also like the School of Education to

be a much bigger part of the Stanford

community. A lot of people on campus

are interested in education: people in

business, law, humanities and sciences,

engineering—think on-line learning and

learning technologies, for example—and

even medicine. And I’d like them to think

of the School of Education as the place

to go when they need the perspectives,

expertise, and collegiality of educationists,

people who know about Pre-K through 20!

We’re experts in the human technology

interface, in understanding achievement

gaps, in schooling policy, and so on. I’d like

us to be a more visible forum for discussion

of national education policy and practice.

As you think about these four priori-

ties for the School, how can alumni and

friends help you in this process?

C: They already are of tremendous help

in many ways as part of our community.

But I hope we’ll become a more salient

part of their lives, where they’ll think of

us as a resource and help us become a

resource to a broader set of people. We

are planning more talks and forums on

major educational issues. Participation of

the alumni and friends of the school in

these efforts is critical to their success.

Being vigorous members of the School

of Education’s network and community is

an important way to help. We will be

expanding opportunities for this kind of

engagement. Also, as we develop a formal

mission and vision, we’ll be looking to our

alumni and friends for feedback, a process

that will unfold throughout the year.

Last but not least, let’s talk about running

because that’s been a big part of your

daily life. You run almost every day. Now

that you’re several months into your ten-

ure, what kind of similarities do you see

between running and running the School

of Education?

C: (Laughs). Running has been a lifelong

habit. I like that there’s a consistency to

running. It anchors your life and your con-

sciousness if you get into the habit—as so

many people have discovered. Maybe that’s

as important as the physical gains, although

those are important too, especially as you

get to my age (laughs). It’s a habit, some-

thing you don’t think about, like brushing

your teeth. It stabilizes you. I try to approach

writing like that too—everyday a little, or at

least something relevant to writing.

There is some transfer to leading a school.

You want to be patient and steady and lis-

ten, and have your visions and ideas grow

as you learn from the community. Basically,

what a dean does is try to be helpful and

fashion something that will help people

make their best contributions. A steadiness

of effort and attention helps. It’s not like it’s

an explosive thing that you do and then you

can forget about it. You have to keep tend-

ing the garden all the time. SE

New Deancontinued from page 15

Claude Steele chats with STEP Directors Rachel Lotan and Ira Lit at last fall’s Dean’s Kickoff.

C.

Wes

selm

an

“No education school in the world has a stronger faculty or student body.” – Dean Claude Steele

Summer 2012 17

Educational researchers this past year have been given a boost in how they may apply their knowledge in service to the public good. That’s thanks to Professor Arnetha F.

Ball, recent president of the American Education Research Association (AERA). Her 2011–12 tenure has brought a greater focus than ever before on the “praxis” part of the organization’s mission to promote excellence in research.

Working closely with AERA General Program Chair Cynthia Tyson of The Ohio State University’s College of Education and Human Ecology, Ball has inspired the organization’s launch of the Educational Research Service Projects program. The program, which will begin this fall, will fund researchers nationally and internationally to bring their research knowledge and exper-tise on a pro bono basis to educational organizations, institutions, or commu-nity groups that have expressed a need for their assistance. “This will move more scholars out of the ivory tower and into real-world settings,” said Ball, who has served AERA in numerous leadership roles since 1990.

Ball, a language, literacy, teacher education, and urban studies expert, also migrated the annual AERA confer-ence in the direction of educational service, as well. The largest gathering of education researchers in the world, the Annual Meeting, held this past April in Vancouver, began a year in advance with dialogue-stimulating articles solicited online from diverse researchers on how to use knowledge effectively. Authors continued the conversa-tions with attendees in special sessions at the conference itself, which boasted four interconnected panel areas: theory to practice; diversity, social justice and equity; policy; and praxis at community, national, and international levels.

The meeting also included consultation with indigenous scholars. An opening plenary session began with a traditional ceremony conducted by members of First Nations peoples

of Vancouver. The ceremony ritualized the organization’s respectful request to hold its meeting on indigenous land and set the stage for the entire event. The opening plenary session talk, given by Linda Twhuli Smith of the University of Waikato in New Zealand, addressed the theme, “The Knowing Circle of Indigenous Education—It Is Not Enough Just to Know.”

In an ingenious move, Ball and her team of volunteers integrated local visual and performing artists from cutting-edge disciplines—dance and theater improv, slam poetry,

music and comic book art—to add new dimensions to the conference. Each evening, a performance stage and gal-lery in the foyer of the convention cen-ter showcased new art pieces (poems, dances, songs, sketches) that reflected humorous and thought-provoking cre-ative responses to the educational ideas and discussions explored at AERA.

One of Ball’s aspirations as AERA president was to lead the association’s effort to “go green,” as well. Toward that end, the meeting offered several alternatives to the print program, traditionally a huge directory describ-ing 2,400 sessions and events. Mobile applications provided all the necessary information, wireless internet service, and kiosks allowed the attendees to

access it online, and the print programs that were produced were reduced in size.

“Arnetha always moved and acted to serve the member-ship,” says Cynthia Tyson. “She is an outstanding mentor, colleague, and friend.”

As AERA president, Ball has galvanized the educational research community, both nationally and internationally. “We’re hearing researchers expressing that they are proud to be AERA members,” she says, reflecting on her heady year. “They’re more inspired to link their work to improving education and serving the public good, be it through formu-lating theory, influencing policy, or serving communities.” SE

17

Making Knowledge CountArnetha Ball Takes AERA to the StreetsBy Marguerite Rigoglioso

Arnetha Ball delivers the Presidential Address at the 2012 AERA Annual Meeting in Vancouver.

Co

urte

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f A

ER

A

FacultyNews

ant to engage students in learning science? Ask

Marjorie Balazs, MA ’63, about the magic show

she used to start a lesson when she taught high

school chemistry. In one demonstration, she turned

water into red wine, back to water and back to wine again. “I would

really blow their minds when I then drank the wine at the end of the

trick!” she recalls with a laugh. “I did not tell the students how any

of the tricks were done, but said that they should be able to explain

all of them before the end of the year.”

Upon reflection, she describes how these demonstrations were

tied to her teaching approach: “When I was a chemistry teacher, I

always believed that students could love chemistry the way I did if I

gave them the opportunity to experience chemistry for themselves,

rather than just read about it or conduct rote experiments.”

Balazs, a longtime enthusiast of chemistry and other sciences,

is passing down her lifelong passion for the sciences to a new

generation of curious minds through her generous support of a

unique partnership between the Stanford Department of Chemistry

and the Center to Support Excellence in Teaching (CSET). Called

Chemistry Experiences and Experiments for Learning (ChemEX2),

the program is a multidisciplinary collaboration designed to help

high school chemistry teachers develop and integrate lab experi-

ences that focus on core scientific ideas in

ways that help students learn at greater

depth. This summer, ChemEX2—which is

aligned with the New Generation Science

Framework—will bring together 24 high-

school chemistry teachers for two weeks at

Stanford to learn strategies for engaging

their students in the practices of both scien-

tific inquiry and engineering design.

“What excites me about this program

is the opportunity for chemistry teachers to

reconnect with their passion for chemistry

and learn new ways to transfer that to their

students,” says Balazs. After teaching high

school chemistry in Colorado, Balazs won

a scholarship for graduate studies at the

School of Education. After working in the

semiconductor industry, she became the

founder of Balazs Analytical Laboratory,

a Sunnyvale, CA-based company known

worldwide for its pioneering work in water

purity and chemistry, and for its ability to

solve the most difficult contamination problems in the semicon-

ductor industry. In 1993, Balazs won the coveted SEMI Award of

North America, the highest award given within the semiconductor

industry to those whose technical contributions most advance the

microelectronics industry.

Chemistry as a Critical Gateway for Academic SuccessChemEX2 is filling a critical need for educators working to pre-

pare their students for college, as tenth grade chemistry is often

considered a gateway course for college admission. For California

high school students, failure to pass chemistry or physics results

in the students’ inability to meet their A-G subject requirements

for admission to the University of California and California State

University systems. Furthermore, tenth grade chemistry often pres-

ents students with the first time they are asked to apply abstract

and quantitative thinking to science—a critical skill that will serve

them well far beyond chemistry. Indeed, the stakes are high for

both students and teachers in these classrooms.

“Giving teachers the resources to continually develop their

classroom practices and reinforce their mastery of the subject

matter is crucial to improve the quality of science education,”

says Susan O’Hara, executive director of the Center to Support

StanfordEducator18

Friends

Marjorie Balazs with Chris Chidsey, associate professor of chemistry.

A Catalyst Helps Launch New Chemistry Learning Lab By Heather Trippel

W

Summer 2012 1919

Excellence in Teaching (CSET). “We know that teachers want to

keep learning—and that their students need them to. Through part-

nerships with science departments on campus like the Chemistry

Department, we offer teachers opportunities to work side-by-side

with science experts and build lessons that engage students.”

Associate Professor Chris Chidsey and Senior Lecturer Jennifer

Schwartz of the Department of Chemistry are grateful for the

opportunity to partner with CSET in the creation of ChemEX2.

Before ChemEX2 was created, Chidsey had regularly hosted sci-

ence teachers to work in his research lab for the summer and

more recently, he and Schwartz have hosted chemistry teachers

to develop laboratory teaching materials. With the founding of

ChemEX2, they wanted an opportunity to widen the impact of these

efforts. “While a summer at Stanford provides a rich experience for

those teachers, I was looking for a way to help more teachers inte-

grate laboratory experiences more effectively in their classrooms,”

Chidsey says. CSET—with its ability to develop, deploy, and assess

professional development programs for teachers—was exactly what

Chidsey and Schwartz were looking for. “CSET provides the lever-

age to reach out to chemistry teachers on a larger scale.”

Launching this summer, ChemEX2 had nearly four times as many

applicants as it had space available for this year. To meet the high

demand, organizers hope to expand the program next summer so

that 50 teachers can participate. The long term goal is to provide

a model for the professional development of science teachers that

can be replicated elsewhere in California and around the nation.

Balazs is not surprised that ChemEX2 has attracted such an

enthusiastic response from educators. “Anyone who is a chemistry

teacher is likely to love it enough to always strive to become better

at it,” she says.

For more information on ChemEX2 and CSET, visit http://cset.

stanford.edu/programs/chem.html. SE

Barnett Family Endows New Chair in Education PolicyThanks to a generous gift from the Barnett Charitable Foundation, the School of Education has a new endowed chair in education policy. The Barnett Family Professorship in Education was established with a gift from the foundation at the direction of Karrie and Larry Barnett, ’78; Annie and Jim Barnett, ’80, JD/MBA

’84; and Laurey Barnett Treiger, ’81,

and Brian Treiger, and with university matching funds. Professor Susanna

Loeb, the faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA), has been named the inau-gural chair.

By providing rigorous, scientific research needed to inform educa-tion policy in meaningful ways, CEPA connects the deep knowledge and resources of the School of Education to the people responsible for run-ning our nation’s school systems. As early supporters of CEPA, the Barnett family has a keen interest in leverag-

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The Barnett siblings with Susanna Loeb and Claude Steele at last fall’s inaugural CEPA Supper. Pictured (L to R): Jim Barnett, Susanna Loeb, Laurey Barnett, Larry Barnett, and Claude Steele.

ing that power with their investment. “The idea of transforming the world through education really resonated with us,” explains Jim Barnett. “It’s

a highly leveraged cause that can bring great benefits to the community at large.” SE

StanfordEducator20

1950sDoris Lee McCoy, MA ’53, published The Magic of

Gross National Happiness (American Spirit Publishing

Company, 2010). The book examines her experience

traveling to the Kingdom of Bhutan, located in the

eastern Himalayas and often described as an earthly

paradise. McCoy examines the paradox of how happi-

ness can be achieved in the absence of material wealth.

She gave a talk about her book as part of Muskingum

University’s Alumni Weekend last June.

1960sJoseph M. Cronin, EdD ’65, authored Reforming Boston

Schools, 1930 to the Present, Overcoming Corruption

and Racial Segregation (Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), now

published in a second edition. Cronin began research

related to this book at Stanford in 1984. He served as a

federal reviewer for the Race to the Top national initiative

with Professor Emeritus Michael Kirst and Jim Fenwick,

EdD ’67.

Mary Ann Somerville, MA ’66, is a retired school super-

intendent.

Alfred La Marche, EdD ’67, has had a lengthy career in

education as a public school teacher, principal, and super-

intendent. An active and busy 85-year old, La Marche

says he is proud of his fellowship as a doctoral student in

the Curriculum Studies and Teacher Education program.

Martha Green Quirk, MA ’67, is an independent educa-

tional consultant and the founder of College Admissions

Consulting in St. Louis, MO, where she helps students

and parents navigate through the college search and

application process. She writes articles about this process

for a St. Louis parent website (www.parentusacity.com).

Tom Quirk, PhD ’67, MA ’62, will have published six

books on statistics between last August and this August,

all with Springer Publishing Company. They include

the recent Excel 2010 for Business Statistics: A Guide

to Solving Practical Business Problems, and Excel 2010

for Educational and Psychological Statistics: A Guide to

Solving Practical Problems. Quirk is a marketing professor

at Webster University in St. Louis, MO, where he teaches

marketing statistics, marketing research, and pricing

strategies. At the beginning of his academic career, he

spent six years in educational research at the American

Institutes for Research and Educational Testing Service.

He then taught courses in social psychology, educational

psychology, general psychology, and social science

research methods at Principia College in Elsah, IL.

Gayle Kaune, MA ’68, has published a new collection

of poetry, All the Birds Awake (Tebot Bach, 2011). She

has won several Washington Poets Awards, a Ben Hur

Lampmann Award, and has been nominated for the

Pushcart Prize. She has worked as a teacher and psycho-

therapist and lives with her husband in Port Townsend, WA.

Don Sharpes, MA ’68, spent last summer on a senior

Fulbright scholarship at Ma Chung University in Indonesia,

where he studied institutional development. He is an

emeritus professor at Arizona State University.

Marjorie Summerville, MA ’68, has served as a class-

room volunteer with San Francisco School Volunteers,

and has seen that great teaching can take place “with a

little help from our friends.” She taught at San Francisco

Unified School District from 1961 to 1978.

1970sMaria del Carmen Jiménez, MA ’78, teaches English

and reading in Spanish to first grade students at La

Preparatoria Abierta in Mexico. Previously, she worked

as a bilingual teacher at Spring Branch Independent

School District in Houston, TX.

Russell W. Rumberger, PhD ’78, has published

Dropping Out: Why Students Drop Out of High School

and What Can Be Done About It (Harvard University

Press, 2011). The book is a response to the rising

numbers of high school dropouts in the US, offering a

thorough analysis of the crisis and recommendations

for addressing and preventing this growing problem.

Rumberger is a professor of education at the University of

California, Santa Barbara and vice provost for education

partnerships at the University of California Office of

the President.

Share your latest news by mailing us the attached envelope or submitting your update at: http://ed.stanford.edu/alumni/keep-in-touch

AlumniNews

continued on page 23

Doris Lee McCoy, MA ’53

Joseph M. Cronin, EdD ’65

Tom Quirk, PhD ’67, MA ’62

Don Sharpes, MA ’68

Martha Green Quirk, MA ’67

Summer 2012 2121

Gerald Fry, PhD ’77, received an honorary doctorate in Education for Local Development from Thailand’s Rajanagarindra University—a rare honor for foreigners. Fry received the degree from the Crown Prince of Thailand. He also gave a public lecture on Thailand’s educational reform efforts at Chulalongkorn University. He was subsequently invited to write a monthly education column in The Nation, a major English-language newspaper in Thailand. Fry received the University of Minnesota’s Award for Global Engagement in 2009, and was subsequently named Distinguished International Professor in International and Intercultural Education. He recently authored a major reference book on Thailand, published by Scarecrow Press in June. Fry has led Stanford alumni groups on travel study tours to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Avishag Reisman, PhD ’11, received the 2011 Larry Metcalf Exemplary Dissertation Award from the National Council for the Social Studies for her dissertation, “Reading Like a Historian: A Document-Based History Curriculum

Intervention in Urban High Schools.” Reisman’s dissertation examined

whether the practices of expert histori-cal reading could be brought to bear in urban public school classrooms, where students read well below grade level. She developed a six-month cur-riculum intervention with over 200 eleventh-grade students in five San Francisco high schools, representing the first extended curriculum inter- vention in disciplinary reading in an urban district. At the core of the cur-riculum, students learned to analyze history in context by examining letters, speeches, and government documents from the period. Using five treatment and five control classrooms, Reisman measured the effects of the interven-tion on the students’ historical think-ing, their ability to transfer historical thinking strategies to contemporary issues, their mastery of factual knowl-edge, and their growth in reading comprehension. Reisman is now a senior public administration analyst at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, & Student Testing (CRESST) at the University of California, Los Angeles. To learn more about the Reading Like a Historian curricu-lum and to watch a video about the project, visit http://bit.ly/zZcerj.

David Yeager, PhD ’11, has won several awards for his research on adolescent aggression, stress, and achievement. At the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), he received the Division E (Human Development) Outstanding Dissertation Award for the article based on his dissertation, “An Implicit Theory of Personality Intervention Reduces Adolescent Aggression in Response to Victimization and

Exclusion.” He also received the AERA Review of Research Award and Division E Distinguished Research Award for “Social-Psychological Interventions in Education: They’re Not Magic,” a paper he co-wrote with Assistant Professor Greg Walton of Stanford’s Psychology Department. Yeager also won the Division 7 Dissertation Award from the American Psychological Association. An assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, he currently investigates the causes of adolescents’ extreme reactions to peer exclusion or victimization, and the changes in academic performance among racial minorities as they transition to high school or college. SE

Gerald Fry, seen here with government and university officials, received an honorary doctorate from Thailand’s Rajanagarindra University.

Avishag Reisman, PhD ’11

David Yeager, PhD ’11, with his family.

alumnI brIefs

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As a Colorado real estate broker in the heady 1990s, Todd Dickson, MA ’02, was successful, but he knew something was missing. “I was making a lot of money, but I wasn’t making a difference,” he says. “I knew there was more for me to do.”

All that changed when he started mentoring six-year old Jeremy at the Tennyson Center for Children in Denver. Abandoned by his parents, Jeremy had been in and out of foster care the previous year, his anger issues too much for any household to handle. Dickson took him under his wing, spend-ing up to four hours a week playing football, reading books, helping with homework, and just plain shooting the breeze with his young charge.

“I loved experiencing how a genuine, heartfelt relationship with someone who had very few positive relationship models in his life could be a really transforma-tive experience for both of us,” he says.

“I found myself looking forward to my time with Jeremy each week more than anything I was doing at work.” The expe-rience helped Dickson crystalize his life’s calling: to go into education to help low-income students rise above their circumstances.

At age 30, Dickson chucked a boom-ing business and moved to California to enter the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP). With a previous master’s

degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University, he decided to focus on science education. “The subject matter, while fascinating and engaging to teach, was really just an avenue for me to con-nect with kids,” says Dickson, who com-pleted his student teaching in physics at Hillsdale High School in San Mateo, CA.

Steeling themselves for a more eco-nomically humble life after the heady days of real estate, Dickson and his wife Heather, a kindergarten teacher, decided to first take posts at the private International School of Lisbon. “While it wasn’t the population that I was aim-ing for, it still affirmed that I had made the right decision to go into education,” Dickson remembers. After three years working with elite students there, how-ever, he headed back to California to the newly created Summit Preparatory Charter High School in Redwood City. There, he joined several other Stanford

graduates to become part of an ambi-tious effort to prepare the school’s diverse student population for success in four-year colleges.

An Unexpected OpportunityWhen the charter’s founder and direc-tor, Diane Tavenner, MA ’00, called Dickson into her office one day and asked him to take over the school, he was stunned. “I didn’t feel ready,” says

Dickson, who had been happily teaching physics at Summit for just a year. “But my long-term goal was to open my own charter school, so I realized this was a huge opportunity and I took the risk.” The rookie suddenly found himself the school’s executive director at age 34.

The choice has proven to be a good one—both for Dickson and the Summit community. Under his leadership, the charter school was named the 118th best public high school in America in 2008, and the 76th best public high school in 2009. In 2010, Newsweek honored Summit as one of the top 10 transformational schools in the country.

And it’s no wonder. A full 100 per-cent of the school’s graduates exceed the entrance requirements for the University of California/California State University system, and 96 percent of the four grad-uating classes have been accepted to at least one four-year college—more than three times the rate of similar students in high schools in California. Moreover, for low-income students (more than 40 percent of Summit’s student body), the

StanfordEducator22

AlumniNews

Chartering New TerritoryBy Marguerite Rigoglioso

alumnI sPotlIght

Nashville-bound: Todd Dickson, MA ‘02

“ ... I’ll take with me valuable lessons on how to lead schools from STEP as well as from the Principal Fellows Program.” – Todd Dickson on his new post in Nashville

Summer 2012 23

charter prep sends almost eight times as many students to four-year colleges as similar schools in California.

“Summit is built around the ideals rein-forced for me in STEP,” says Dickson. “Our underlying philosophy is that everyone is capable of graduating ‘college ready.’ We’re diverse, we don’t separate kids into ‘tracks,’ and we are principle-based rather than rules-based. We get to know our students really well, and we aim to create a physically and emotionally safe environment for them. In short, we want them to thrive, no matter what their background.”

Back in 2008, the school captured the attention of Davis Guggenheim, the award-winning filmmaker of An Inconvenient Truth. Guggenheim’s team filmed Dickson and fol-lowed one prospective student through the high-stakes lottery process for acceptance at Summit, along with student hopefuls at four other charter schools. The result, Waiting for ‘Superman,’ a documentary released in 2010, analyzes the failures of American public education. “I learned a lot about filmmaking in the process, namely, that four hours of interviewing generally boils down to about 20 seconds,” Dickson laughs.

On the more serious side, he notes that the film has become a lightning rod for the polarized debate over the role of charter schools in American education. “Some think charters will change public education; oth-ers insist that we must fix our current public schools and that charters are actually hurting them,” he explains.

An Invitation from NashvilleDickson’s own loyalties remain firmly in the charter camp, so much so that his next adventure will be a leap to start his own char-ter management organization in Nashville.

23

alumnI sPotlIght 1980sKatherine Tobin, PhD ’84, MA ’84, was nominated by President

Barack Obama in March to serve on the board of governors of

the U.S. Postal Service. She first served on the board of gover-

nors from 2006 to 2009, where she chaired the board’s audit and

finance committee. From 2009 to 2011, she served as Deputy

Assistant Secretary in Performance Improvement at the U.S.

Department of Education, where she focused on strengthening

the Department of Education’s culture and building its capacity to

work most productively with its political and educational partners.

1990s David S. Doty, MA ’90, was named the 2011 Educator of the

Year by the Utah Technology Council, which represents over

500 information technology, bio-technology, engineering, and

life science companies in Utah. Since 2008, he has served as the

first superintendent of Canyons School District in Sandy, UT. The

33,000 student district is the first new school district to be formed

in Utah in nearly 100 years. Prior to his appointment, Doty was

assistant commissioner and director of policy studies for the Utah

System of Higher Education, and the director of Utah Scholars, a

business-education initiative that motivates high school students

to complete a rigorous, college preparatory curriculum.

Marc Chun, PhD ’99, joined the William and Flora Hewlett

Foundation as its education program officer. At the Hewlett

Foundation, Chun develops and implements the Education

Program’s Deeper Learning “proof points network” and its

research agenda. The network is a collaboration among ten

school operators who oversee more than 400 schools in 37 states

to document the effectiveness of educating students in skills that

emphasize the mastery of core academic content, as well as skills

in critical reasoning, problem solving, collaborating, communicat-

ing effectively, and learning independently.

2000sVaibhavi Gala, MA ’00, launched Camp Imagineerz, a sum-

mer day camp for children from grades 1 through 4. Located in

Mountain View and Los Altos, CA, the summer camp offers games,

exercises, stories, and characters to create an atmosphere in which

campers build “i-can” attitudes and a commitment to persever-

ance. Gala’s inspiration for the camp came from her experiences

as a student in the International Educational Administration and

Policy Analysis program and as a parent of two children.

Vaibhavi Gala, MA ’00

continued on page 24

continued on page 25

continued from page 20

David S. Doty, MA ’90

StanfordEducator24

AlumniNews

Julio Cardona, MA ’04, is a doctoral candidate in the

Higher Education program at the University of Michigan,

Ann Arbor. He is completing a dissertation study on doc-

toral student motivation towards degree completion.

Afsoun Yazdian, MA/MBA ’07, recently sold GoGo

Lingo, a language learning website, to Rosetta Stone.

As an MA/MBA student, Yazdian developed GoGo

Lingo’s proprietary “Playful Immersion” method, a

language learning approach designed to help children

learn Spanish primarily through pictures and sounds.

GoGo Lingo uses games, music, and humor to allow

children to comfortably learn a foreign language

within a context that involves natural, stimulating, and

meaningful communication.

Langan Courtney, MA ’07, is a refugee education

specialist for the Oakland Unified School District, where

she designs and coordinates district-wide educational

and socio-emotional support programs for refugee

students and their families. Selected as a 2012 Rotary

World Peace Fellow, Courtney took a six-month leave of

absence from her position and moved to Bangkok, along

with 22 other Peace Fellows from 14 different countries.

In Bangkok, she completed a professional development

certificate program in Peace and Conflict Resolution at

Chulalongkorn University. She also traveled to Burma/

Myanmar, Cambodia, Nepal, and Thailand.

Nicholas Haisman, MA ’08, returned to England last

summer to pursue training as an educational psycholo-

gist at the University of Bristol. He consults with pub-

lic and private schools across the United States and

England on social and emotional learning, and supports

the development of curricula for gifted and talented

students. He now serves as affiliate director for Future

Problem Solving U.K., which provides opportunities for

students to build their collaborative and creative prob-

lem solving skills.

Sara Wernick Schonwald, MA ’09, says her experiences

as a student in the Policy, Organization, and Leadership

Studies program helped crystallize her vision that all

kids should have the opportunity to be the change

they wish to see in the world. In 2011, she launched

Listen to Lead Consulting to help young people and

those who serve them develop the skills and awareness

to serve and lead in their communities. Listen to Lead

provides leadership training for students, teachers, and

administrators; helps organizations nationwide to create

or revise programming and strategy; and leads team-

building retreats for schools and other organizations

that serve youth. Sara lives in San Francisco with her

husband and two-year old daughter.

2010sElizabeth Newton, MA ’10, received the Hilton

Ulitmus Brown Alumni Achievement Award from Butler

University for her philanthropic professional work and

her commitment to Butler University. She is the founder

and executive director of Allowance for Good, a non-

profit organization that educates and engages youth in

philanthropy to cultivate global citizenship and improve

education internationally. Allowance for Good runs a

web-based platform that teaches its participants that

global philanthropy is not bound by age and that their

relationship with money—beyond saving, investing, and

spending—should involve sharing. Its interactive web-

site guides youth to understand the challenges faced

in education in rural communities around the world and

the power they have to create change. Newton began

this venture while she was a student in the International

Comparative Education master’s program.

Daniela Rubio, MA ’10, is helping launch Teach for

Mexico (Enseña por México), an initiative to improve

Mexico’s educational system by transforming its top

graduates into lifelong leaders committed to improv-

ing the lives of students across Mexico. Set to launch in

next January, Teach for Mexico plans to place over 200

young leaders in schools across various states. It is affili-

ated with Teach for All, a global network that supports

similar organizations in 23 countries.

Rubio and Mauricio Farías Arenas, a doctoral

candidate in the International Comparative Education

program, will publish their article, “Efectos escolares en

las escuelas de nivel medio superior de la Ciudad de

México: un estudio de valor agregado (School Effects

Afsoun Yazdian, MA/MBA ’07

Sara Wernick Schonwald, MA ’09

Langan Courtney, MA ’07

Elizabeth Newton, MA ’10

Daniela Rubio, MA ’10

2000scontinued from page 23

Julio Cardona, MA ’04

Summer 2012 2525

Shirley C. Morse, MA ’47, died on February 17, 2010 at age 91 at her home in Venice, FL. She graduated from Cortland College, where she met her husband Rexford. After college, they moved to rural communities in upstate New York to be public school teachers. She was a physical education teacher at Gouverneur High School until she interrupted her career to join the Army Medical Corps during World War II. She served as a physical therapist at Walter Reed Hospital with a rank of second lieutenant and was honorably discharged. Shirley was passionate about skiing, sailing, golf, and mountain climbing and was an accomplished seamstress and stained glass artisan. Active in her church and community, she served on the United Church of Christ State Board and volunteered with TideWell Hospice Inc., among many other organizations. She is survived by her husband of 65 years, Rexford; her children Sally Emerich, Laurie, and Roger; six grandchildren; and seven great-grand-children. She was predeceased by her daughter Nancy in January 2002. SE

In memorIam

“This is been a dream of mine for some time now,” Dickson says. While he originally intended to pursue that dream in California, a chance visit last fall by Nashville Mayor Karl Dean to learn why Summit was so successful as a high-performance school changed all that. “I gave them a quick tour and mentioned in passing that I eventually wanted to run my own charter organi-zation. The mayor said I should come to Nashville to do it,” says Dickson.

While being courted and wooed by the city to “come on down,” Dickson learned that Nashville was widely con-sidered as one of the top places in the country to start charter schools, due to the creation, among other things, of the Tennessee Charter School Incubator, a $30 million fund designed to support such efforts. As

a senior fellow with the Incubator starting in July, Dickson will head the effort to create a charter management organization that will open eight to ten schools over the next ten years.

“Although I hesitate to leave the orbit of Stanford, which Summit has partnered with regularly to train student teachers, I’ll take with me valuable lessons on how to lead schools from STEP as well as from the Principal Fellows Program,” Dickson says, referring to his participation in the Stanford initiative aimed at strengthening exceptional, early-career principals. He adds, “I plan to work with the excellent education schools in Nashville to create a collaboration like the one we had with Stanford that can serve as a model for how universi-ties and charters can collaborate to

create better outcomes for kids.”As Dickson prepares for his new

journey ahead, he reflects back on the young student he mentored who started him on his education path some fifteen years ago. Today, Jeremy is now almost 21. “We are in touch with each other all the time,” Dickson says. “He is like a little brother to me. I am very proud of the man he is becoming, and how hard he has worked to lead a positive, purposeful life even with all the obstacles placed in his way. In many ways, Jeremy is reflective of many of the young kids that I am so passionate about guiding. More than anything else, they need people to believe in them long enough and with enough certainty and love that they eventually begin to believe in themselves and their goals.” SE

New Territorycontinued from page 23

alumnI sPotlIght

in Upper Secondary Schools in Mexico City:

A Value-Added Study)” in an upcoming

issue of El Trimestre Económico. Rubio and

Arenas presented a preliminary version of

their paper at the May 2011 annual meet-

ing of the Comparative and International

Education Society in Montreal.

Maureen Suhendra,

MA ’11, is a member

of the school imple-

mentation team at

Khan Academy, where

she works closely with

teachers, students, and

developers in creating

joyful, individualized classrooms that meet

the needs of every student. SE

Maureen Suhendra, MA ’11

StanfordEducator26

StudentNews

Jakeya Caruthers was honored with the Diane Middlebrook Graduate Teaching Prize from Stanford’s Program in

Feminist Studies for her course, “Black (W)holes: Queering Afro-Futurism.” The course examines the artistic ideology, radical political philosophy, and social cl/aim that scholars and artists have termed “afrofuturism.” Looking to critical feminist, queer, and race theory as an interpretive base, the course considers ways that Black explorations of space, bio-technologies, sci-fantasy, and the complex connections between the past and future might hearken to or give room for a queer liberationist politic. A doctoral candidate in the Anthropology of Education, Caruthers was also nominated for her work as a Teaching Assistant in Lecturer Kathleen Coll’s Fall 2011 class, “Introduction to Feminist Studies.”

Vickie Do received a math-ematics teaching fellowship from the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation. She discovered a pas-

sion for teaching and working with youth as a student at Bolsa Grande High School in Westminster, CA, and attributes her desire to teach and men-tor students to her high school math teacher, Mr. Nguyen. A STEP teacher candidate in Secondary Mathematics Education, Do is the first in her family

to graduate from college and pursue a master’s degree. Upon graduation, she will begin her teaching career at a small public high school in Brooklyn, NY, where she plans to incorporate key components of Complex Instruction and help every student feel confident and “smart” as math learners, and ultimately close the achievement gap.

Sara Rutherford-

Quach, MA ’06, was awarded a National Academy of Education Spencer Dissertation

Fellowship for her dissertation, “Hands Up, Mouths Shut: Silence and Speech in a Second Grade Classroom of English Learners.” Her dissertation examines the role of silence in classrooms serving language-minority students. She found that two basic types of silence were salient in the second grade classroom that she studied: a) communicative silence, which students use to creatively comply with and re-establish patterns of interaction, and b) “that which is not said”—silences that relate to issues of race, ethnicity, presumption, inequity, and opportunity in this classroom and the greater school community. A doctoral candidate in Educational Linguistics and Anthropology of Education, Rutherford-Quach hopes to identify and understand the circumstances and contexts that contribute to silence in classrooms that serve English Learners, as well as the role of silence as a non-verbal communicative tool. Ray McDermott and Guadalupe

Valdes serve as her advisors. The NAEd Spencer Disseration Fellowships are given annually to approximately 20 students whose dissertations demonstrate potential for improving education worldwide by bringing new perspectives to the history, theory, or practice of educa-tion. Fellows receive $25,000 and are included in professional development retreats with members of the National Academy of Education and other senior scholars. This is the first year that the Spencer Foundation is part-nering with the National Academy of Education to administer these awards.

Lisa Yiu just finished her dissertation fieldwork in Shanghai, where she explored the integration of rural migrant

children in urban public schools. Funded by a Fulbright scholarship, Yiu conducted ethnographic research for ten months, during which she served as an English volunteer at two schools—one that segregated rural and urban children and one that did not. Last November, she was awarded the Harvey Fellowship, an international scholarship awarded by the Mustard Seed Foundation to Christian graduate students at premier universities who have the potential to impact system structures in their field. After completing her dissertation, Yiu plans to continue her research on Chinese education and rural migrant children, with the goal of informing Chinese educational policy and school practices. SE

Summer 2012 2727

StaffNews

Human Resources Administrator Cindy Cho

received a staff award at the 2012 Stanford

Asian American Awards Dinner in May. The

incoming chair of the Asian Staff Forum, she

was honored for her work as a special pro-

grams board member, and for her outstand-

ing service and contribution to Stanford.

Caroline Girgis joined the External Relations

team as the new donor stewardship man-

ager. She oversees and expands the School

of Education’s stewardship of its support-

ers at all levels. She previously worked at

Stanford Lively Arts, the university’s per-

forming arts series, where she managed

education and outreach programs. Girgis

worked for nearly 20 years in Chicago’s performing arts, arts edu-

cation, and philanthropic communities. She received BA degrees

in Music and Italian from the University of Southern California, and

an MA in Music History from the University of Chicago.

Janice Jackson joined the Stanford

Center for Opportunity Policy in Education

(SCOPE) as its executive director last July.

She was previously at the Harvard Graduate

School of Education, where she was a lec-

turer in the Educational Leadership and

Organizations program and provided

support for the Urban Superintendents

Program and the Wallace-funded Executive Leadership Program

for Educators. She also served in the leadership cadre of three

major urban school systems, and worked as a consultant for

state education agencies and school districts. Her work in this

arena includes service as deputy superintendent for Boston

Public Schools. Jackson has extensive experience in the policy

area at the federal level, where she served as Deputy Assistant

Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S.

Department of Education. She is a board member and consultant

with major educational organizations that support research and

development; professional development; academic, social and

emotional learning for students; and the pursuit of greater equity

and opportunity.

Emi Kuboyama, MA ’00, has been appointed director of

leadership degree programs, overseeing the Policy, Education,

and Leadership Studies (POLS) master’s

program, and the joint MA/MBA program

with the Graduate School of Business. She

previously served as an education attorney

with the U.S. Department of Education,

and was director of policy development

at Policy Analysis for California Education,

and senior policy analyst with the Chief

Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the

University of California, Berkeley.

Holly Materman is the new manager of

the annual fund and school events. She

manages planned giving appeals for the

School of Education’s annual giving pro-

gram, and organizes the Cubberley Lecture

Series and other school events hosted by

Dean Steele. She previously taught English

in Beijing and Leysin, Switzerland before

working as an ESL curriculum developer and executive producer

in educational publishing with Computer Curriculum Corporation.

Materman served on the boards of Family Connections, a parent-

participation preschool for low-income families in San Mateo

County, and the San Carlos School District Parent-Teacher

Association. Before coming to Stanford, she ran the donor

stewardship and parent education program for the San Carlos

Educational Foundation. Materman received her BA in English

from the University of California, Davis.

Nereyda Salinas is the new managing

director of career resources. Salinas leads

the School’s career support efforts to equip

our students and alumni with resources to

help them achieve the greatest possible

impact on the education field. Prior to this

position, she directed the School’s leader-

ship degree programs, working with faculty

and staff to increase admissions selectivity and pilot several

academic initiatives. She brings over ten years of experience

managing youth development and education reform programs

and organizations in Chicago and Boston. Salinas served on

the Harvard Business School’s MBA Admissions Board, and

was the Boston-area admissions volunteer liaison for Stanford’s

Undergraduate Admissions Office. She received her BA in inter-

national relations with honors in education from Stanford, and

received an MA in public policy from Harvard Kennedy School. SE

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East Palo Alto Academy Teacher Honored by Arne Duncan

Misla Barco (R) relaxes with East Palo Alto Academy Principal Yetunde Reeves and Vice Principal Jeff Camarillo before the academy’s 2012 graduation ceremony at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium.

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Misla Barco, a high school Spanish teacher at East Palo Alto Academy, walked into the office of Vice Principal Jeff Camarillo (MA ’05) one early morning in May expecting to meet with him about recruitment. What she got instead was a phone call—from none other than U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. As part of National Teacher Appreciation Week, Duncan selected Barco from among hundreds of nominations to personally call and thank her for her unwavering dedication to youth in East Palo Alto. Barco, a nine-year veteran of the academy, cried tears of joy. “It makes me very happy and very proud that I am part of this amazing experience,” Barco said. “We are changing people’s lives.” SE